“O Petrarke hed and prince of poets al,” begins one of two anonymous sonnets commemorating the Italian poet, in what we now recognize as the foundational text of the English lyric tradition, Tottel’s Miscellany of 1557. Francesco Petrarca was a generation younger than Dante and became, in time, the first begetter of Renaissance humanism, but for English poets writing two centuries later, he was their head, their prince, and even their archetype, whom they translated and imitated as they brought into being modern English literature.

Petrarch composed many works of lasting influence. The lyrics of his Canzoniere were not, in his lifetime, thought to be among them. Yet they were the object of the forgotten sonneteer’s praise. Another poem from the collection, Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “Description of the Contrarious Passions in a Lover,” is essentially a translation:

I find no peace, and all my warre is done:
I fear, and hope: I burne, and frese like yse:
I flye aloft, yet can I not arise:
And nought I have, and all the world I season.

This exemplifies what little most English readers know of Petrarch. For most of us, as for the novelist and poet John Williams, he is synonymous with a movement, Petrarchanism, that consisted of “an airy elegance,” chiefly decorative, in which “rhetoric is very nearly the whole poem.” To the example of Petrarch we attribute the strained, inventive, elaborate, even gaudy figures of English poetry; the use of paradox to give complex expression to the overwhelming but inarticulate passions of human existence; and even perhaps the choice of love as the major theme of the lyric poem. Petrarch practically gave birth to the literature of the English Renaissance.

For those who want to understand why Petrarch reigned over the great poetry of the Renaissance and why his precedent shaped our own English tradition, A. M. Juster’s translation of the complete Canzoniere will be of obvious interest. But this does not exhaust its significance. To have all three hundred sixty-six poems of Petrarch’s lyric sequence is to discover that, while the poet had definite limits (the trope of freezing fires and burning ice seems to have lurked over his shoulder and lunged for the page before he had a chance to consider any other possible metaphors for anguished yearning), he was a much more varied poet than is usually remembered.

Juster has approached his work as a true artist. As a translator of verse, he has attempted to respect and reproduce Petrarch’s celebrated forms with faithful, if imperfect precision. As a poet in his own right, Juster has attempted to give us not just accurate translations but works that survive as good poems. Canzoniere CXXXIV is the basis for Wyatt’s “Description.” Here is Juster’s translation:

I find no peace, and war is not for me.
I dread and hope, and burn and freeze, and fly
above the heavens, and on dirt I lie;
I clench the world but grasp futility.
One keeps me jailed without security,
and neither claims me nor undoes the tie.
Love does not clip my chain nor make me die;
he wants me dead, but will not set me free.
I see while blind and lack a tongue, yet keep
on screaming, and desire death, seek relief,
despise myself, and love another too.
I feed on pain, I’m laughing while I weep;
both life and death provide me equal grief.
I am like this, my lady, due to you.

Both Wyatt and Juster preserve the Petrarchan octave, with its A.B.B.A.-A.B.B.A. rhyme scheme. Wyatt’s final six lines (the sestet) depart from the original, while Juster follows it. Wyatt’s translation is heavily end-stopped, so that the pause at the turning of every line clarifies the contraries mingling in the lover’s passion. Juster introduces an enjambment at “and fly / above the heavens” that obscures this feature of the poem, but Juster’s final line more exactly conveys Petrarch’s sense. In a sign of things to come, Wyatt has improved on Petrarch in giving us this for a last line: “And my delight is causer of this strife.” The “you” in the original is, of course, Petrarch’s Laura. His unrequited love for this lady, over the course of more than twenty years, provides the occasion for all the Canzoniere. Wyatt obscures the fact that the poem is a complaint, but he also manages to convey why Laura is the occasion of so much “strife.” She is his “delight,” and so he squeezes one final contrarious passion into his poem that is absent in the original.

When we read Juster’s translations, we are much closer not only to Petrarch’s syntax and his rhyme scheme but also to his meaning. These efforts will inevitably be the reason his version receives critical attention. The feat is considerable. The vast majority of the poems here are, of course, Petrarchan sonnets. As Andrew Frisardi notes in his invaluable introduction, “There are 317 of them.” But there are also “29 canzoni, 9 sestinas, 7 ballate and 4 madrigals.” Sometimes, Juster’s faithfulness in rhyme and meter work against clarity in the poem’s meaning. At the end of poem XII, for instance, Juster gives us

and if time fights my sweet desirous ways,
at least it will not stop my misery,
for sighing is some help, despite delays.

All is well until that final line, which renders “alcun soccorso di tardi sospiri.” A clearer translation would have shown us Petrarch gaining “some relief” from prolonged sighs, which might in turn have been rendered, “I find some help in sighing’s long delays.” I found a few other questionable instances along these lines as I paged through the volume, and there are a few poems where Juster translates into tetrameter or hexameter, departing from the usual pentameter. In the majority of cases, however, I felt inclined to defer to him.

Poem XXII is the first of Petrarch’s nine sestinas. The sestina is generally regarded as the most complex of the “fixed forms” in poetry, that is to say, those poetic forms that not only define the meter and rhyme scheme but also determine how the stanzas will unfold and the total number of stanzas. The sonnet is the most common of these; the sestina is rare and usually intended to show off metrical virtuosity. Petrarch succeeds in his first sestina, but Juster’s performance outdoes him by being faithful to the Italian and yet translating it into fluent English stanzas that maintain the intricate sequence of repeated end words proper to the form. Consider just the first two stanzas, but note that the end words continue to rotate in a regular pattern across the six main stanzas of the poem before they are repeated one final time in a fixed order within a three-lined envoy:

For every animal that dwells on Earth,
except the handful that despise the sun,
the time for laboring is during day,
but, when the sky illuminates its stars,
some come back home as others nest in woods
to take a rest at least until the dawn.
And I, whenever the resplendent dawn
starts spreading shadows all around the earth
and waking animals in all the woods,
have had no truce from sighing to the sun,
then while I watch the incandescent stars,
I wander, weeping and desiring day.

The reflective beauty and simplicity of Petrarch’s pastoral is here, as is the balance of expression and the movement from the external cycles of nature’s life to the interior movement of Petrarch’s sighs and weeping for Laura. The only obscurity of phrasing (“no truce from sighing to the sun”) reflects an obscurity in the Italian. Having seen Juster faithfully reproduce so many of the qualities of the original, one entrusts oneself thereafter to the master. And the master has many fine passages.

Many poems return to the theme of the pastoral, where the beauty and solitude of nature provides a refuge from Petrarch’s sorrows (and the corruption of the Avignon papal court) but also a place where he can give vent to his inevitable weeping and sighs freely:

so I believe by now shores, mountains, dales
and rivers understand my temperament,
which is obscured from all humanity

Laura’s presence in his heart he describes as “like some great lady in a tenement,” and in his grief, he speaks of his “looted soul, its riches peeled away.” Petrarch can be inventive, but within very clear limits, as I have mentioned. His best conceits would inspire better ones by later poets. As such, a passage such as the following seems grand because it is archetypal, as if it were plowing the tough soil and making it easier for other farmers to work in future seasons:

I saw on Earth angelic features here,
and holy beauties no one else will see,
thus recollection pains and pleases me
as everywhere dreams, shade and smoke appear

The poems are arranged so that they take on both a liturgical and a narrative structure. They appear not in the order of composition but in an order that Petrarch hoped would convey his years of pining for Laura. The chief theme of the poems is Petrarch’s anguish, weeping, and sighing as he longs for the twin stars of Laura’s eyes, complains of her cruelty, and calls her his “enemy” while he describes the arrows with which Eros has pierced him. All this concludes with her sudden death (Frisardi and others speculate that she died of plague along with several members of Petrarch’s family), which is announced in sonnet CCLXVII only by a subtle suggestion: “but in the wind the words were swept away.”

With just under one hundred poems left in the sequence, Laura is dead, and Petrarch no longer can burn with lust for her as he has done for two decades. He must either fall silent or discover a new theme.

He discovers a new theme. Several of them. What was the meaning of Laura’s beauty and of his suffering for love of it? What did that mortal beauty have to do with the spiritual splendor Laura now irradiates in Heaven, a splendor invisible to the eye but perceptible to the memory of the soul? While Petrarch does not answer ninety-nine different ways, he does give us several possible answers, not all of them compatible, over ninety-nine poems. He tells us his lust was futile (he is “sad and repentant for each wasted year”). He tells us his love of Laura was a distraction from the call of true beauty, devotion to God (“weeping for a past I spent / on earthbound passion for a mortal thing”). He tells us that his anguish was a spiritual marathon that conditioned him for the life of virtue, wisdom, and holiness (“that my salvation needed agony / and that eternal peace demands brief war”). And he tells us that Laura’s mortal beauty is itself a reflection of the divine beauty, and so to love Laura is already to enter on the path to holiness and the blessed life (like the Blessed Virgin Mary, she is a Star of the Sea: “a star above this storm-beleaguered ocean, / a guide true helmsmen use reliably”).

These late poems are variously secular and sacred in their themes. Sometimes Petrarch merely grieves, left alone weeping with his wound. Most of the time, Petrarch senses Laura has attained to a perfection of beauty and chastity beyond the limits of this world. Taken together, these final poems are abler in construction, deeper in thought, and more powerful in expression than the previous two hundred sixty-six poems. That said, as one reads through the Canzoniere in sequence, one is likely to see that the poems improve the further one enters into the sequence. Why this is I do not know. Many of the early poems have an obscure and digressive order of expression that is intriguing but frustrating. By the beginning of the second century, Petrarch seems to be toying with a more classically balanced rhetoric, such as we find in the catalogue of paradoxes in poem CXXXIV. But the few complaints he makes of Laura in life can compete with the many fine things he says about her in death.

In the final account of Laura he gives us, where she becomes a mediatrix of grace and beatitude, most readers will find a loud echo of Dante and his love of Beatrice. Although Petrarch once claimed never to have read Dante, he clearly owed a great deal to the older poet, whom he met in his youth. What separates Petrarch from Dante goes a good distance in explaining the interest and limitations of the former’s poems.

Readers of the Divine Comedy will know of Dante’s friend Guido Cavalcanti and of the circle of poets to which they belonged that came to be called the stilnovisti. They were all love poets. Cavalcanti’s poems explore, in a philosophical register, love as a disintegrating force that undermines the finite unity and perfection to which the human person may aspire. Love will tear us apart. When Dante began writing the poems that eventually took their place in the Vita nuova, he may well have shared Cavalcanti’s misgivings about love. He also shared his sense that the true poet must be also the true philosopher of love.

The Vita nuova offers us just such a philosophy. In the early passages, Dante tells us how wretched his love for Beatrice has made him and does so with a precise anatomy of melancholy. But, midway through the book, “Ladies that have intelligence in love” rebuke him with a pointed question: why do you love her so much if she makes you miserable, huh? Here Dante discovers a new theme. Beatrice’s beauty is sensible and spiritual. It is also salutary. It restores the soul to order, orients it to the good, and sheds blessings everywhere it shines.

It is only one step from here—though it is a big step—for Beatrice to become a mediating figure of the divine beauty, an allegory of supernatural faith, and a guide from the dark woods of sin, through the pathways of natural reason, and on, through the gates of Purgatory, to the realms of the blessed and, finally, the eternal radiating light of God. Dante came to depict all this in the Divine Comedy, but how he depicts it is as important as his essentially Christian Platonic vision leading us from the beautiful to Beauty Itself, from Beatrice to the Triune God. Like Cavalcanti, Dante’s intellectual formation was philosophical and theological. For his poem to be great it must itself become a work of philosophical and theological authority. Dante thus became a philosopher and theologian of love who, in his poem, charts for us the metaphysical structure of all reality, and it does so with as much precision as the medium allowed.

Petrarch, as we noted, became a founder of Renaissance humanism. As the intellectual historian James Hankins has written, Renaissance humanism shared Dante’s basic Christian Platonism and its theology of beauty in particular. Through encounters with the beautiful, we may be humanized, become more fully human, and be formed in the image of perfection. But the humanists were specifically impatient of metaphysics and anything that smelled of the pedantries of scholasticism. They celebrated every noble image that might serve in education as self-formation, but they were contemptuous of an illiberal logic chopping that seemed more concerned with being true than being good. Dante’s poetry aspired to physics, metaphysics, and theology; humanism venerated rhetoric, history, and ethics.

This goes a good way toward explaining the relative weakness of Petrarch’s poetry. He gives us the subjective experience of anguish just as Dante did in his early poems. He gives us a sense of the connection between worldly or sensible beauty and the beauty that is in Heaven. But, in contrast with Dante, he has no interest in a metaphysics that might be characterized as systematic. In consequence, his individual poems rarely take us beyond the interior experience of sighing and weeping, and, in the poems meditating on Laura’s death, they scatter in every direction, untethered by any unifying vision. Petrarch sometimes echoes Cavalcanti, sometimes Dante. Laura is his enemy, then Love is, the cause of all his tears. Then Laura is the image of virtue and a queen of Heaven, while Love, like supernatural grace, draws Petrarch’s thoughts upward to the realms of the divine. Petrarch’s mode of expression is suitably paradoxical, but in the later poems it also becomes incoherent.

One can of course excuse the incoherence. Love and grief, the way human beings live them out, are mostly incoherent. Petrarch captures the contradictions of desire and also the contradictions of grief. One minute, we weep to see beauty buried in the ground. The next, we are nostalgically nursing the memory of that beauty, and still the next, we are finding our thoughts rising up to Heaven thanks to the grace of that memory. Then we do it all again. But Petrarch’s Canzoniere is not the Divine Comedy. It has a loose unity, but not a total one. It hangs together, but it doesn’t really add up. Petrarch is Dante’s equal in surveying and depicting the experience of the interior life of the soul, but he falls far short of him in giving us, as it were, the metaphysical anatomy that can make sense of it all.

Petrarch thus marks a steep falling off from Dante. And yet, this must be qualified in two ways. First, Petrarch opened up possibilities of expression that would make possible the sonnets of Sidney, Greville, Spenser, Daniel, Shakespeare, Drummond, Drayton, and Donne. He helped those poets to see the mutual implication profane and sacred love have for one another; he also helped them understand the lyric poem as a species of art whose main theme, love, may be predictable, but whose secondary theme, the rhetoric of love, becomes a creature of infinite possibility. Second, in several of Petrarch’s religious poems, he achieves heights of sublime expression that only Dante ever equaled. This may especially be said of the final poem (CCCLXVI), a grand litany to the Blessed Virgin, a petition and a prayer that Juster has given us in a masterly and fluent English.